Photo credit: ilgmyzin
Twitter Blue’s nebulous benefits have gained a new perk – the ability to upload two-hour videos. Perhaps unsurprisingly, piracy did occur.
The newest feature for Twitter Blue subscribers is the ability to upload two-hour videos. This expands the video upload capabilities of Twitter Blue subscribers over the previous 60-minute limit. Other changes include increasing video size from 2GB to 8GB Allow video uploads via iOS. If all of this sounds like it will facilitate the spread of pirated content on the platform, that’s because it is.
Within hours of the announcement, a user responded to Elon Musk’s message Notice with the full Shrek 3 movie attached. “Fuck it all. “Shrek the Third,” reads the tweet accompanying the film. At the time of writing this article, the film has been removed due to a copyright lawsuit.
A bootleg version of Super Mario Bros Movie also appeared on Twitter, although it was uploaded in two parts to get around the one-hour video limit at the time. Now, an entire feature film (less than two hours) fits into Twitter’s upload parameters — for $8 a month.
It’s unclear why Elon Musk thinks increasing Twitter’s video limit is a sound business strategy. Unlike the competition, Twitter doesn’t yet have the capacity to run ads over long content. Musk announced a general monetization program on Twitter in February 2023, but that promise never materialized.
The decision is also confusing because Twitter’s video player is designed to display short video content. It doesn’t remember where you stopped playing when you click away. As such, it’s currently not possible to pause and resume a two-hour clip. The copyright detection system on Twitter also sucks compared to systems like YouTube’s Content ID. The Shrek film stayed online for an hour and a half before garnering enough attention to be removed.